26/10/93

The Will That Won’t

There's just one small thing the PLO could do to show their good faith - and they haven't done it

By: SAM ORBAUM

THIS peace business is all about acquiring promises at the cost of premises. The Left rallies around the former, the Right, the latter.
    It is we who are consistently pressed to surrender tangible evidence of good faith, while they barter the intangibles; ludicrously, we put up with it.
    There is not much in the way of hard evidence that Israel can demand from the PLO as a show of good will, as conviction that they are no longer the barbaric executioners who slaughter for sport but rather leaders of an enlightened, civilized people. At the same time, there is not much the PLO can do to change our hardened hearts.
    All that could change in a gasp with one show of humanity: give us back Ron Arad, Yosef Fink, Zecharia Baumel, Rahamim Alsheikh, Zvi Feldman, Samir Assad and Yehuda Katz. How small a concession this would be, how large a display of civility. It is pathetic that such a basic tenet of propriety has become such a remote expectation of fellow human beings, that we have come to accept the abandonment of our men and the torment of their families. How little it would have been for our peace barons to demand this much as a precondition to legitimization of the PLO, as proof that they have distanced themselves from primitive precepts.
    And then we proceed to release Palestinian prisoners and even readmit deportees, many of them members of radical groups that may be the ones holding our hostages. (Our principle of never abandoning a soldier in the field has taken on grotesque transmogrification. We abandon our boys, but rescue the enemy).
    It is of no consequence that the PLO itself does not hold our men or their remains. At the very, very least, they should be able to give us definitive word as to their condition.
If the PLO pleads that they cannot do even this much, then we have no business dealing with them, as human beings or as a political force.
    It is outrageous that this modicum of morality has not been a basic demand by our negotiators - not just of the PLO, but of Syria and Lebanon as well. It is just not possible that the hostage holders are not subject to pressure from any of these forces.
    Cryptic - and obnoxiously cynical - proof of this is the statement last Wednesday by chief Palestinian negotiator Nabil Sha'ath at the Taba talks: "We will be happy to help Israel locate the captive navigator [Arad], but this will only be done at a later stage in the talks." Well, what are we talking about? Faith? Trust? Promises? Civility? That is all they can offer us, and they are not prepared to offer a shred of evidence that there are grounds for discussion.
    Sha'ath dismissed our hostage trauma with the same tasteless nonchalance that Egyptian President Mubarak scoffed at the 1985 Ras Burka massacre of Israeli vacationers ("It is a small matter"). And there was not a murmur of objection or outrage from our side. Sha'ath must be wondering why the PLO should take the issue so seriously if Israel doesn't.
    If Sha'ath's statement wasn't enough, on the very same day, we had our nose punched regarding the only other concession we can hope for at this stage, the ending of the Arab boycott. Samir Abdallah, the head of the Palestinian delegation to the multilateral economic talks, said that it is too early to call off the boycott, since not enough progress had been made in the peace process.
    This dearth of confidence-building measures is very ominous. Yasser Arafat himself, not two days after shaking hands with Yitzhak Rabin, showed that in his perception, the new day dawning in the Middle East is an overcast one. He could have said something dignified, diplomatic or gracious, rather than stridently imploding the spirit of the day by trumpeting that Jerusalem would be the Palestinian capital.
    Are these people making promises in good faith? I can't wait to see how neighborly the Syrians become when we give them back the Golan.